Tuesday, March 16, 2010

more train thoughts

I have had reading glasses for probably about six months now and like various other orbiting geegaws they dominate my life at the same time as generally speaking I try to ignore them. Of course I remember I need them the minute I sit down to read because my eyes are now far too lazy to focus properly on small print. I knew I needed them initially because some very small print on bottles was indecipherable as was stuff like my staff card ‘bar code’ (as it’s known, though in fact it’s a string of Arabic numerals) which has an evil sequence of zeros in it I can never untangle.

It’s not that I’m not used to wearing glasses though, because I have always taken comfort in sunglasses. One of the things about sunglasses though is that they allow you to look at other people – for instance your fellow commuters on the 8:10 out of Broady station – without them necessarily knowing that’s what you’re doing. And this becomes a habit, and then you (by which I mean I) might be wearing my reading glasses on the train and I forget that not only can everyone see my eyes as I glance irritatedly at the woman opposite me who is either suffering from flu or the world’s worst hayfever (in March?) and apologizing under her breath as she drinks her snot, but that my eyes are in fact magnified and probably under magnification reveal the innermost workings of my tawdry mind like some kind of blog.

I suppose I am comfortable with glasses generally though, because I keep forgetting to take them off. One of the reasons is no doubt that they are reading glasses therefore intended just to assist me reading things close, and they have no bearing on my long vision, so if I am reading and then look up at something further away, I am not alerted to the fact that I still have glasses on, by any kind of vision issue. Wow that was a boring paragraph.

Last night we watched The Mentalist (I think they really are just recycling old Columbo scripts now) and Q&A. I thought Shorten came out OK and to my surprise I warmed to Catherine Deveney without too much trouble. Miranda Devine was seemingly level headed but also seemingly out of her depth (I would be like her in that situation: she was privately thinking, ‘look, I’m a writer, not a talker, and if it was just me broadcasting to you without all this dumb interaction, I could make you believe whatever I wanted’) and Waleed Aly was most entertaining. Mia couldn’t watch the Liberal guy because she found him excruciatingly boring.

Fuck I hate people who pick at their fingernails on public transport. They should have their own carriage like smokers used to. It should then be decoupled from the train and allowed to roll gently into a siding and then be exploded.

Young people often talk like dicks. A girl just answered the phone on the train with that bizarre ‘o’ sound in ‘hello’. It’s kind of like helleaux, but with a shorter ‘o’ sound and somewhere in there there is an ‘e’ sound too and a hint of an ‘oi’ sound too. How do they do that? It’s talented. But it still sounds dicky.

1 comment:

oh god, i wonder how many people with new glasses do that thing on the train where they forget they aren't wearing sunglasses and stare at people without realising the people can see them doing it? I know I do. Now I'm worried I might also be picking my fingernails without realising.